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You haven't said anything about *what* kind of company you want to work for? Established? Startup? Tech? Non-Tech?

There are half a dozen fortune 500 companies that are *not* regular old tech companies that are either head quartered or have major operations within 20 miles of downtown Seattle. Many of these companies have huge IT departments running their ecommerce sites or internal systems (think Nordstrom's, Costco, Starbucks, Expeditors, PACCAR, Boeing). And that doesn't count a dozen or so other major regional companies such as the local hospital systems and insurers. Many of these companies have a multitude of openings and often times opportunities for quick advancement because Amazon and several other local companies have hired away many of their employees over the last 2 - 3 years by throwing gobs of money at them.

Also as several people have noted the unemployment rate in Seattle is low but not so low that people will pay for your relocations, unless your skills are phenomenal.

Buy the necessary equipment. Learn how to do it and learn how to do it well. Enough said. This will be better than any technology. Ensure you have a good barometer and comprehensive paper charts also. You never know what will happen.

Those people suggesting an EPIRB are on track. There are several good books that will give you the basics on the sailing technology you need. I would add a laptop computer with satcom as a backup also.

Finally, a skerry cruiser is a long slender and most importantly low freeboard boat. I know the "best boat arguement" for sailing around the world is touchy, but this might not be the best boat for offshore sailing in heavy seas. Have you done a careful evaluation of the vessel as well as your relative skill level and experience as a sailor and where exactly you plan on sailing to? I'm assuming yes as you are having it built but I just wanted to check. I for example in the Pacific Northwest would *not* take this type of boat into the North Pacific or out of our sheltered waters.

mask.of.sanity writes "Verisign admitted it was hacked repeatedly last year and cannot pin down what data was stolen. It says it doesn't believe the Domain Name System servers were hacked but it cannot rule it out. Symantec, which bought its certificate business in 2010, says also that there was no evidence that system was affected. Verisign further admitted in an SEC filing that its security team failed to tell management about the attacks until 2011, despite moving to address the hacks."

jbrodkin writes "VMware is telling customers that two Windows 7 security patches have left VMware View users incapable of accessing their Windows desktops. Security updates issued on Patch Tuesday fixed Windows but broke the VMware View connection between users' PCs and remotely hosted Windows 7 desktops. Users will have to upgrade VMware View or uninstall the Microsoft patches in order to regain access to their desktops."

dawilcox writes "I'm a recent grad and am going to begin work at a software company. I want to make a good impression on my boss and coworkers. I know that performance is usually tracked, but there are also innate personality traits of good software developers that bosses just want to have around. What are those personality traits? What should I be trying to do in order to make a good impression on the people at my work?" (Appropriate side question: What behavior traits would you like your co-workers to exhibit?)

After the recent announcement that Groklaw will be archived at the Library of Congress, mjn writes with word that the push to archive more digital content continues: "The US Library of Congress announced a deal with Twitter to archive all public tweets, dating back to Twitter's inception in March 2006. More details at their blog. No word yet on precisely what will be done with the collection, but besides entering your friends' important updates on the quality of breakfast into the permanent archival record, the deal may improve access for researchers wanting to analyze and mine Twitter's giant database."

MrSmith0011000100110 writes "The lovely people over at AndroidCentral have broken the announcement that Android 2.1 is finally coming to the Motorola Droid, with actual proof on Verizon's Droid support page (PDF). I don't know about my Droid brethren, but I'm pretty excited to see the new series of Android ROMs for the Droid phone that are based on a stock Android 2.1. As most of us know, the existing 2.1 ROMs can be buggy as hell and either running vanilla 2.1 or a custom ROM; but this phone is still a tinkerer's best friend."

astroengine writes "Assuming you had an interstellar spaceship, how would you navigate around the galaxy? For starters, you'd probably need a map. But there's billions of stars out there — how complex would that map need to be? Actually, Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow from Harvard, has come up with a fun solution. He created the 'Milky Way Transit Authority (MWTA),' a simple transit system in the style of the iconic London Underground 'Tube Map.' (Travel Tip: Don't spend too much time loitering around the station at Carina, there's some demolition work underway.)"

A US judge has granted political asylum to a family who said they fled Germany to avoid persecution for home schooling their children. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, moved to Tennessee after German authorities fined them for keeping their children out of school and sent police to escort them to classes. Mike Connelly, attorney for the Home School Legal Defence Association, argued the case. He says, "Home schoolers in Germany are a particular social group, which is one of the protected grounds under the asylum law. This judge looked at the evidence, he heard their testimony, and he felt that the way Germany is treating home schoolers is wrong. The rights being violated here are basic human rights."

quaith writes "It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to differentiate Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance."

cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW:
"You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole."
That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.

angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."

I've worked in the Seattle software industry since high school "way" back in 1997, including stints with the Evil Empire [microsoft.com]. Today I lead software development teams for a Seattle area Fortune 500 company. I graduated from the University of Washington [washington.edu] with a degree in Information Systems.